


Dark Water

by ArchivalAssistant



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Horror, Drowning, Near Death Experiences, Statement Fic, spoiler-free
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-12-07 13:54:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20976998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArchivalAssistant/pseuds/ArchivalAssistant
Summary: Statement #0150901Statement of Jessica Spare, regarding a series of strange encounters involving a pond in the forest near her childhood home. Original statement given January ninth, two thousand and fifteen. Recording by Johnathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.





	Dark Water

Statement of Jessica Spare, regarding a series of strange encounters involving a pond in the forest near her childhood home. Original statement given January ninth, two thousand and fifteen. Recording by Johnathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. 

Statement begins.

There was a pond, outside my house when I was a kid. Well, not outside my house really, but near it. When I was eleven my parents got a divorce, and my mum and brother and I moved out to a house in the countryside. "A fresh start", my mum called it. I think she just wanted as far away from Dad as she could get. It was fine by me, though. The house itself was set back into the surrounding trees a bit, and if the nearby road was free of cars -as it often was- while you were in the back garden, you could almost pretend you were far deeper in the woods, far from the rest of humanity and all its noise and mess. I would play in those woods nearly every day after school, and during the summer I practically lived out there. I always stayed within about a twenty minutes walk of the house, though, just to be safe. Well, almost always.

I found the pond one of the rare days I ventured out further than normal into the trees. My brother Alex would claim he saw it first, but he hadn't even wanted to go out that day, I had to convince him, and I had decided in my nearly-thirteen-year-old wisdom that that meant I was to be credited with the discovery. It was in a small clearing, framed on all sides by heavy old oaks that formed a canopy of branches overhead, giving the water a dappled sort of look. A branch that must have fallen quite some time ago was sticking out of the water, bark gone and inner wood bleached pale from the sun. The pond wasn't extremely deep, maybe five or six feet, and the bottom was littered with small stones that stood out from the dark coating of mud. I suppose the whole scene would be considered idyllic, but something about it… threw me off. I think it was the way the shadows looked. They were… too dark, it seemed, and the distortion of the water's surface made them look almost like fingers, stretching across the water. Despite the warmth of that summer day, I felt a chill run up my spine, even as my brother celebrated our find. We ran back to the house and after showing the pond to our mother and promising never to go swimming alone, that clearing became our new playground. Alex was quite the swimmer that summer, and I did my best to push down the strange anxiety I still felt every time I gazed too long into the dark, branching pattern on the water's surface. 

When school started again we were limited to only visiting the pond on weekends, and the weather turned chill quickly that year, much to my brother's disappointment. I, on the other hand, was relieved. I still couldn’t explain to anyone else why the pond bothered me so much, but no longer having to hide my unease whenever Alex dragged me out to the clearing to supervise while he splashed around for hours on end lifted a weight off my shoulders. I resolved to never go near the pond again, no matter how much Alex pleaded next spring. 

I managed to keep that promise for all of a month. Alex's friends had all heard about the pond at this point and were dying to see it, and my mother designated me as the chaperone for the group of boys only a year or so younger than myself. We walked out to it in the late afternoon, the carpet of decaying brown leaves shifting in the breeze and crunching under five sets of feet. It was actually quite beautiful, but that did nothing to stop my stomach from dropping when we entered the clearing once more and I saw that strange pattern lacing the surface of the water. There was something slightly different about it, but in the chaos of trying to keep four twelve year old boys from throwing one another into water that likely wasn't much warmer than ice, I was unable to figure out what was putting me off. It wasn't until they grew bored of looking at the thing and started back towards the warmth of the house that I was able to stand in the quiet and get a good look. The shadows on the water seemed larger than they had been last time I was there. That couldn't be possible, though, the branches had lost their leaves since then and if anything, the shadows should have been narrower. But they weren't. I walked back across the clearing, towards the pond, and for a reason I couldn't quite name, bent down to lower my fingertips into the water. It wasn't as cold as I had anticipated, likely warmed slightly by the sun, until I moved my fingers into a shadowed patch of the water. 

The change was instantaneous. The temperature plummeted so dramatically between the two areas that I could feel as the iciness wrapped around my fingers and began to spread up into my hand. A terror came over me as I got the strangest feeling that the shadow didn't want to let go. I pulled my hand out of the water, the action seeming to take more effort than it should have, and turned to run. It was cowardly, I know, to be so terrified of cold water, but the sensation was so strong that I felt I could do nothing else. 

One of Alex's friends -I think his name was Calvin? Colin? Something like that- was standing in the trees, a few feet back from the edge of the clearing. I noticed then that the air felt very still, the wind having stopped completely. It felt like a held breath to match mine as I waited for the boy to say something, make fun of me for my reaction or explain that he had gotten separated from the group. Instead he just looked past me, at the pond. Now, this may just be the fog of a twelve-year gap, clouding my memory, but I swear his eyes had been green earlier that afternoon, not the dark, almost black color they seemed to be in that moment, as the shadow of a falling leaf passed over his face. I shook my head to try and right myself and walked over to him, pointing out the way to return to the house. We ended up reaching it just a couple of minutes after Alex and the other two boys, a strange look passing between them as they watched us exit the trees and join them inside. 

I didn't go back to the pond for years after that afternoon. I flat out refused to go whenever Alex wanted to go swimming, and despite me trying to explain to him what I had felt, the strangeness of those seemingly growing shadows, he never listened to me, only looked at me with an expression like he was trying not to laugh. I left for Uni after graduation to study psychology, and was graduated by the time I returned to my mothers' house. It was winter holiday, my plans to get a flat with some school friends had fallen through, and my mum said she missed having me around, so I decided to move back in temporarily. Being rent-free was quite appealing, even if it meant a slightly longer commute to my job and sleeping in my childhood bedroom that hadn't been updated since I'd discovered My Chemical Romance. I had nearly forgotten about the pond entirely, until Alex mentioned it over Christmas dinner, making sure to remind me of how "chicken" I was for not swimming in it. I had my own supply of embarrassing stories to fire back at him, but even as we jokingly sparred and my mother cut in occasionally with a story about one or both of us, the pond stuck at the back of my mind. I lay awake that night, trying to decide whether or not to go back and look at it one last time, see if it was really as bad as my teenaged self remembered. 

I decided to visit the pond the next day, slogging through the thick blanket of snow and trying not to trip on any of the fallen branches it may have hidden. It took me less time to reach that clearing than I remembered, but I knew I was in the right place as soon as I saw it. 

The pond was no longer merely dappled with the shadows of the branches overhead. Despite the clear winter morning and the lack of leaves to block the sun, the surface of the pond was completely obscured, creating an inky black surface that served as a mirror when I walked over to the edge. It gave the pond the look of being endless, a feeling that only increased when I noticed how absolutely still the water was. Like a cat poised to spring, I remember thinking, the thought making me shiver with no help needed from the chill wind. 

The seed of dread that started in me the night before was now in full bloom, muscles seizing as I suddenly wanted nothing more than to get as far away from whatever the hell this was, as fast as I could. As I stepped backward, my foot caught on a slick patch of packed-down, wet snow and I slipped, falling onto my back with my left leg landing in that black water. The painful cold of it shocked me, and I tried to pull my leg out and get to my feet. 

The hand wrapped itself around my ankle before I could do either. 

It pulled with a strength I could barely register before the rest of my body entered the water and I realized that cold was far too small a word to describe the intensity of what I was experiencing. It sank into my skin, into my bones, until it felt like they had turned to ice, and the cold only kept growing stronger. I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or shut, it was so dark, and I realized that it didn't matter as I couldn't tell if I was a few feet or a few hundred feet under the surface. My only sense of direction disappeared when the hand released its hold on my ankle and I began drifting, terrified to move for fear of going the wrong way and getting closer to whatever it belonged to. 

I don't know how long I drifted down there, in that icy dark. Time, sight, warmth, that water pulled all their meanings away. I never drowned, despite the cold shocking the breath out of me even before I had been pulled completely under. The police told me I was missing for twenty-seven hours, counting from the time I left the house that morning to the time they found me laying on the bank of the pond, soaking wet and so cold that my hair had frozen to the ice on the ground below me. I tried to explain what happened, the strange shadows on the water, the hand, but they were more focused on preventing hypothermia than on listening to that must have sounded like mad ravings. 

They didn't see the shadows. 

I don't know where they are now, but if they're still out there, please, you have to do something. They say your institute collects artifacts, objects that do things like this. I know a pond isn't technically an artifact, but I don't know who else to turn to. 

I'm still so cold. 

Statement ends. 

Notes: 

Tim did look into this case, and found a police report for the disappearance of and successful search for Miss Spare. Sasha did some digging as well and was able to find newspaper articles from the time period documenting the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old Colin Burke from the same town in two thousand and ten, approximately four and a half years before Miss Spare's incident. Unlike Miss Spare, however, Mr. Burke was never found, alive or dead, and no arrests were ever made. Assuming that this is the same boy who befriended Alex Spare and was mentioned in the above statement, he must have had a similar reaction to the pond that Miss Spare had. One must wonder whether he also made the same mistake, and ventured too close to the edge. 

End recording.


End file.
